Sounds utterly ridiculous. Yes, you need to identify the severely underperforming people and either fire them or move them to a different job more suited to their talents, but in this stacking system, if you do that somebody more competent then becomes the "bottom tier" and is suddenly in trouble. It seems to me that the whole system is designed to make less work for managers--instead of fairly assessing their staff all they have to do is stack them against each other using some KPIs and make all their decisions based on that!